Back in my Apple II days, I would occasionally get a magazine that came with a 5-1/4″ floppy inside. Later, of course, CD inserts became commonplace. But around the time I was learning to walk, Interface Age was shipping software by Flexi Disc. Little plastic records. First at 300, then 1200bps. It looked like it was insanely hard to get working but I find the idea that people went to this much trouble pretty inspiring.

I’ve attached some photos from my trusty BioniCam where you can see the binary nature of the disc, though I borked the focus ring so the 400x ones are a bit blurry.

Also, I wasn’t sloppy with the scanning. All that white crap in the record images is actually on the underside of the scanner glass. I guess I’m going to have to tear the thing apart and clean the inside too.

THE FLOPPY ROM #2

(Happy Computing with a General Ledger Account Program)

By popular request this month’s Floppy ROM™ is a business program rather than a software development program. The reception to Bud Shamburger’s General Payroll Package in the June issue was overwhelming with many additional requests for his General Ledger Package to be featured on a Floppy ROM™.

THE largest vertical letter file in the world was built in Prague, Czechoslovakia. It consists of 3,000 drawers, 10 feet high, reaching from floor to ceiling and covering approximately 4,000 square feet. The drawers are all equipped with roller bearings.

“Unconventional” recording formats make recovering data from old disks a bit tricky. A problem the Archive Team has been dealing with as they endeavor to preserve roughly everything that has ever been stored. Ever.

In thousands of retail and wholesale businesses today, you’ll find a Recordak microfilmer working side-by-side with billing machines— doing away with descriptions on bills… and reducing posting time by 85%!

The routine is this easy: billing clerks in retail stores, for example, post only the totals of sales checks, credits and returns on the bill.

CONTENTS of the original copies of valuable books are being filmed by many libraries throughout the country and the rolls loaned out instead of the books themselves. The reader may then study the material by reflecting it on a screen by a tiny projector that is loaned with the rolls. A roll is placed in a machine turned at the reader’s convenience by means of a tiny handle.

INSTEAD of filing away a copy of the newspaper every day for future reference, morgue keepers can now merely make a photograph of the sheets of the paper and file the negative of the photo away in the morgue. This is achieved by means of an extremely sensitive camera recently invented which reproduces the entire sheet on a film the size of a postage stamp, solving storage problems.

“My computer helped me write The Final Encyclopedia. I wouldn’t trust anything less than Scotch Brand Diskettes to make a long story short!”

Gordon R. Dickson,
Science Fiction Author, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Gordon Dickson: a small businessman whose product is his own imagination. He’s written more than 40 novels and 150 short stories; his newest work is The Final Encyclopedia. He uses his personal computer and word processing software to maximize his production. All his words-his product-are stored on diskettes.

Camera Snaps Answers
To speed recording answers in computing machines, Kodak has made a new camera that snaps 1,000 12-digit numbers a second. The numbers are photographed from a cathode-ray tube as spots; retranslated into electrical impulses by photoelectric tubes as desired for feeding back into the computer. Mosaic above is film section enlarged 25 times. A 100-foot strip holds 3,000,000 digits.